There is a common thread that runs through all agendas that increase the power of the State: Separation of human beings from one another. Obamacare meddles in the doctor-patient relationship. Common Core meddles in the teacher-student relationship. Excessive regulation of businesses meddles in the customer-merchant relationship. No fault divorce meddles in the husband wife relationship and the child-parent relationship. Abortion especially meddles in the mother-child relationship. Same sex marriage meddles in the child-parent relationship by insisting that no child needs — nor should they even desire — a relationship with both of their biological parents, parents of both sexes. We can deny these facts all we like, but the State’s role in separating us undeniably exists in each of these policies.

Central planning has always been about separating and isolating people. And the attack on the family has always been about centralizing the power of the state for the benefit of the few elites in control of it.

“Marriage equality” and transgenderism has been such a centerpiece of the Obama Administration’s transformation agenda precisely because undefining marriage jump starts the process of separating families. The separation of families inevitably snowballs into the separation of people in other kinds of relationships, particularly friendships. Family breakdown can’t help but play a key role in the breakdown of social trust and the disintegration of once functioning and vibrant communities. Every totalitarian society depends upon a sense of alienation among its people. Central planning agendas are always pushed in the name of something positive-sounding like “love makes a family” or “authenticity” or any number of platitudes. Tyrannies always claim to support the very thing they intend to destroy.

The marketing boom in artificial reproductive technologies — especially for same sex households — shows us the extent to which ART serves to deliberately sever a child’s bond with either the mother or the father or both. Transgenderism separates us at perhaps an even more intimate level, because it ultimately renders all sex distinctions meaningless, thus separating us from our identities as either male or female, father or mother, son or daughter. This may seem counter-intuitive in an age when transgender individuals like Bruce Jenner portray an exaggerated image of the female persona. But the ultimate goal of gender theory is the obliteration of all sex distinctions. We might say that the Jenner phenomenon simply manifests the “transitional” moment we are passing through in the interim.

We ought to disabuse ourselves of the notion that the LGBT agenda was ever about the rights of a minority demographic. It’s always been a convenient vehicle towards the centralization of power. Which depends upon human separation. Always in the name of togetherness.

A complex problem is sometimes referred to as a Gordian Knot. You may know the Greek legend or myth in which an oracle prophesied that anyone who could undo the complex and intricate knot tied by King Gordius of Phrygia would rule all of Asia. Many tried and failed. But when Alexander the Great was confronted with it, he didn’t bother with convention. Legend has it that he stepped back and just sliced right through the knot with his sword. We sometimes call this kind of solution “thinking outside the box.”

I ponder this story as I consider how crazy and complicated our modern problems have become.

In my teen years at school we used to refer to the news as “current events.” Homework sometimes included looking at a newspaper or a network news program. Then there’d be a report to the class.

Fast forward to today and things are moving so fast and furious in unpredictable directions that “current events” seems an antiquated term. We have layers upon layers of crises that have congealed into a problem so humongous that it confronts us like a complex Gordian knot of cosmic proportions. How can the damage ever be undone? The past month alone contains enough angst and lunacy to last generations. We’ve seen the expose of Planned Parenthood’s racket in trafficking organs from aborted children, with graphic videos that give us a fresh perspective on the horrors and sorrows of abortion. Then we have the transgender hype being fed to us 24/7 by Hollywood and the media, with a ramped up campaign to push gender confusion hard onto school children.

And now that the Supreme Court has legally abolished marriage as a male-female institution, we are about to see the biggest piece of censorship legislation ever. It pretends to be an anti-discrimination bill and goes by the name “Equality Act.” The idea is to mete out punishment to anyone who doesn’t get with the agenda to re-program en masse our language and our thoughts. In particular, it aims to re-design everyone’s thoughts about personal relationships. That’s because ultimately all personal relationships emanate from organic marriage. How so? you may ask. Because that’s the union that produces citizens who build communities in which other personal relationships are spawned. Destabilize marriage and you’ve destabilized the basis for functioning families. Without functioning, autonomous families, we can’t have functioning and self-reliant communities. In the end, the State wins big.

But the landscape is becoming littered with more and more rabbit holes being dug on a daily basis by our government: data-mining, the replacement of personal medical care with medicine-by-bureaucracy, debilitating multi-trillion dollar debt, the cultivation of ignorance in the schools through enforced conformity by programs such as Common Core, the non-stop attacks on religion.

On the international scene, it’s just as much a Twilight Zone. We have the Obama Administration’s weird Iran deal that puts the world closer to war. At the same time, the White House turns a blind eye to the mass killings of Christians in the Middle East. The cult of ISIS marches on to replace the Rule of Law with Sharia Law. In the meantime, the Administration is intent on force-feeding the gay agenda on a global scale, including to under developed countries like Kenya where he lectured the leadership last month. The list goes on and on and on.

The media and Hollywood do little but feed and cultivate attitudes of self-absorption. Academics also foster self-absorption in their college students who now can’t read literary classics because the content is too “triggering” for their tender emotions. We should ask: How on earth can people have real relationships or establish any kind of true community if everyone is so obsessed with their own delicate sensibilities? The answer is: we can’t.

Healthy personal relationships need a foundation of common reality and common language through which people can communicate. Most of all, they need a common belief that there is inherent worth and dignity in all human beings, not just themselves.

So as more folks sink deeper into believing life is all about them, they are more liable to end up like Bruce Jenner: obsessed by the urge to project an imagined persona everywhere and eager to suck up whatever oxygen might be in any given room. Or like abortionists who must callous their souls in order to live day to day.

As the Arthur Ashe award in honor of Jenner’s gender transition proved the other night, we seem close to hitting rock bottom. Turning one’s fetish into a cause celebre might be a nervy thing to do, but it doesn’t resemble the virtue we’ve traditionally called “courage.” All the less so because of the heaping helpings of adulation, support, doting, protection, fawning, and heavy shielding the media and special handlers have been giving Jenner for doing so.

In fact, nary a word has been spoken about Bruce Jenner’s fault in a February car crash that killed a woman and left several others injured. (Though one of the drivers involved has publicly pointed out that Jenner’s lack of personal responsibility made him ill suited for the award.)

Against this scenario of craven self-worship and self-obsession, it shouldn’t surprise us that a top abortionist and director at Planned Parenthood would brag about harvesting organs from unborn children. Deborah Nucatola told undercover associates of the Center for Medical Progress how she personally goes about this with babies up to 24 weeks gestation. She was videotaped saying:

“We’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so I’m not gonna crush that part. I’m gonna basically crush below, I’m gonna crush above, and I’m gonna see if I can get it all intact.”

It’s a ghoulish business that shocks people of conscience. But we live less and less in a society that respects and understands the value of conscience. Instead, Planned Parenthood reflects the attitude of Dr. Josef Mengele who conducted experiments on prisoners in Nazi Germany. And, of course, of its founder Margaret Sanger who was a full blown eugenics enthusiast whose counsel the Nazis sought in the 1930’s.

How did our culture get to this place? I think, in part, by accepting the antiquated notion of “modernity” or “progress” as though it is something enlightened. Using abortion as a means of sexual “liberation” only serves to numb us, to separate ourselves from the humanity of others. There’s no room for true human connection in such putrefied places devoid of human worth.

At the Magazine Stand: Bruce Jenner on cover of People Magazine, January 2015

Bruce Jenner’s Vanity Fair stunt, photo by Annie Leibowitz, June 2015

Today I just want to offer some links for reading about the Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner hype. I have not yet weighed in on this with a published article of my own, but I hope to soon.

So, the other day we had a much-ballyhooed Vanity Fair cover story in which the gold medal winner of the men’s decathlon in the 1976 Olympics “came out” as a woman. Whether or not Jenner looks convincing or glamourous on the cover is neither here nor there as far as the endgame of the Transgender Project is concerned. The endgame is to erase all sex distinctions in law. The Jenner publicity stunt is basically a tool to affect and direct public opinion as a means of moving forward on that goal. The agenda is far more expansive and invasive than normalizing the desire to “present” as male or female in public.

I commend to you the following articles, if you have not already read them. These four all appeared in the Federalist:

Many prefer just to turn their heads away from all of this, and I understand that. But it is crucial that we pay attention and weigh in – and push back – because it affects all of us: through the corruption of our language, through modification of our behavior, and through coercion and anti-speech laws.

We have already seen how the forces behind this movement have been conducting a war on language in which any “misgendering” of pronouns is considered an act of discrimination, or even hate. None of this bodes well for liberty in society. A good way to push back is to question the pronoun protocols and to resist them. Why resist? Because it’s not really about “gendering” the transgender person. It’s about de-sexing you, by default. It does this through the enforced language, which pulls you into accepting the fiction that everybody’s sex — including yours — does not exist in physical reality, but only in the mind.

I’d like to add, incidentally, that I don’t object in everyday life to calling someone by their preferred name, transgender or not. But there is a difference between that and being lured into a trap of language corruption through pronouns usage that basically redefines humanity for everyone. I hope to write about that soon. This corruption of language also has the effect of short-circuiting our ability to communicate freely with one another. It sows distrust and that is a force that aims to separate us all. As George Orwell noted, the corruption of language puts us at the mercy of tyrants.

In short, we really are dealing with a war on reality itself. Sadly, it’s a train wreck that’s been a long time coming.

A Navy SEAL squad in a CRRC during an exercise (photo from Wikimedia commons)

Today in The Federalist you’ll find my article President Obama’s Trans National Strategy in which I investigate why the Administration is going into hyper drive to push transgenderism. We can see this especially in the context of the 2015 National Security Strategy, released last month. It leaves little doubt that the Administration is hellbent on making sure transgender individuals serve openly in the U. S. Military. Transgender military personnel would then have the green light to target and harass any officer or other personnel who may not seem on board — all on the pretext of anti-discrimination protection, of course. It’s an agenda of seismic proportions that seems likely to sow chaos and confusion into the military, endangering its mission of defending the US Constitution. At the end of the day, the LGBT agenda enforces on America a military less able to maintain order and discipline, as well as a society that does away with sex distinctions. It’s a global agenda too. Here are some excerpts:

In the broader context of Obama’s sex and gender politics, transgender issues seem to be taking a position of critical importance in the White House efforts to reinvent us all. This follows naturally enough from our president’s evolution from paying lip service to traditional marriage to open advocacy of same-sex marriage. State endorsement of the reinvention of sexual relationships in marriage blends almost seamlessly into state endorsement of the reinvention of sex and gender distinctions.

And—voila!—in December, Attorney General Eric Holder announced in a memo that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination “on the basis of sex,” shall henceforth be read to include gender identity. This year’s State of the Union address was the first to mention the word “transgender.”

All of this seems to be on its own inevitable trajectory to push transgenderism hard from above.

Holder’s new and expansive interpretation of the word “sex” greatly magnifies the power and reach of the Justice Department to prosecute businesses and individuals, or any entity that appears out of line with gender identity non-discrimination. Expect to see it used to put down any corner of resistance to transgenderism in the military.

This month six adult children from same sex households are submitting an amicus brief to the Supreme Court opposing same sex marriage. Two of them — Robert Oscar Lopez and Rivka Edelman — have co-authored/edited a just released book which explores the fallout from the social experimentation we are all living through. Please click here and “look inside” the text of Jephthah’s Daughters at Amazon. I hope you decide to buy a copy.

The book is a rich anthology of articles and testimonials that describe experiences not discussed in the media. According to Lopez, “We can help the reader understand why something viewed by so many as beneficial was actually harmful to so many more.”

I am honored to be a contributor, having written the introduction to the chapters on society and the globe. There are six sections in the book. The first, “Children,” explores the experiences of children who are separated from at least one natural parent. This can happen in many different ways, but children of same sex households are separated from a parent by design. Alana Newman who blogs at AnonymousUs.org was donor-conceived and wrote the introduction to this section.

Section III “Society,” reviews the whole Pandora’s box that same sex marriage is unleashing against healthy human relationships, against children, and against freedom. Some of the vehicles are transgenderism, polygamy, incest, and sex education as a means of state control of children. Section IV, “Globe,” discusses the emergence of the LGBT ideology throughout the world and what the growing commodifying of children means for human freedom (hint: a form of bondage, a form of slavery.) Yours truly wrote the introduction, and I suppose the bottom line I can’t escape is that this movement is putting us on the fast track to centralized power, and probably on a global scale. In many ways, it’s a central planner’s dream come true.

Section V, entitled “Gays” includes reflections by those whom the LGBT movement claims to help, but does not. Jean-Pier Delaume-Myard notes in his introduction that the LGBT agenda actually leads to inequality for gays, not equality.

Section VI, “Bards” explores the McCarthyism of the LGBT agenda — in the arts, the media, academia and throughout society. Its introduction is written by Michelle Shocked, a world-renowned singer-songwriter twice nominated for Grammy awards. She asks: “How did a crusader for children’s rights become the target of a smear campaign? Answer: The same way a champion for artists rights did. By identifying the nexus of non-existent nonsense that is much easier to attach ad hominem to than the question at hand.”

This is an extremely important book with perspectives that have been overlooked — and, in fact, blocked — throughout the entire debate on marriage. Bobby Lopez founded the International Children’s Rights Institute because, at root, his fight is really about the rights of children. Children have the right to know their origins. And nobody has the right to turn them into commodities.

Propaganda often seems to start with a Potemkin Village. The Wikipedia definition of Potemkin Village happens to be pithy: “a fake village built only to impress.” It’s a facade that masks a false reality with an attractive illusion. Today we have “SuperTrans” figures cherry picked by Hollywood to present a impressive picture of transgenderism, to promote it particularly for kids and steer them down the rabbit hole of “gender identity.” Below you’ll see a clip of one of the daytime talk drones, Katie Couric, interviewing a transgender homecoming queen.

The idea here is to destabilize the audience’s sense of reality by presenting a very female looking person with male DNA. Nevermind that just a tiny fraction of less than one percent of the population might identify as transgender. (From the Hollywood juggernaut, you’d think it was something like 25 percent of the general population.) And nevermind that sex change regret is so real that 90 percent of all transgenders are lost to medical follow up.

So is Couric talking to just an ordinary teen-ager from an ordinary family? Don’t kid yourself. This looks like a “Ryland” situation, i.e., another fantasyland poster family for transgenderism. The youtube video for the child Ryland Whittington is a professional production. And so is this Couric number. The LGBT lobby is extremely well-monied with a huge power agenda that serves to cultivate gender dysphoria, particularly in kids. The parents who have signed on with it get loads of accolades and support. Those who don’t — like Joshua/Leelah Alcorn’s parents — are pilloried with threats to remove the child from the home. In any event, it’s very difficult for vulnerable children who look at this seemingly perfect situation and let their imaginations — and whatever past hurts they harbor — trigger them into believing that they were perhaps always the opposite sex inside. Plus, if they go along with it, they are protected thru the “anti-bullying” agendas that, incidentally, were developed to protect only LGBT kids and virtually nobody else.

The parents who are enabling this agenda have — for whatever reason — bought into the hype. Their message to all other parents and all other children is this: if you don’t reject the physical reality of sex, you can expect to be attacked and vilified in the public square. According to them, your existence as either male or female is all in your mind. Couric and Oprah Winfrey have taken on the mission of pouring this PC kool-aid down the throats of all Americans.

What we have here is a Potemkin Village interview. It’s meant to show a facade of the Trans-Agenda, implying: “Gee, if only kids could be given hormone blockers so that their bodies don’t develop in puberty, then wow, they can look more like the sex they claim to want to be. Everyone should let go of their doubts and drink up this koolaid. Doubt, by the way, is the equivalent of ‘hate.'”

Below is an Oprah Winfrey propaganda clip from about five years ago. In it she interviews transgender supermodel Lea T. The idea was to promote and glamorize sex reassignment surgery. Today a primary goal of the transgender lobby is to push hard to get everyone to accept the transitioning of children. Before that, the focus was primarily on adults. We can look back and see Oprah working to soften the ground here, as always prodding us to align our attitudes and beliefs with hers:

Of course, we’ve reached a new stage in the propaganda war to force feed transgender ideology to America at large. Last night the TV series “Transparent” won several awards at the Golden Globe Awards. The series centers around a family in which the father comes out as transgender. Audiences undergo a lot of emotional manipulation and emotional blackmail in this sort of propaganda.

My Friday Federalist piece on Leelah’s Law was about the transgender lobby’s exploitation of a teen’s suicide to push their agenda a whole lot harder. The proposed law would essentially criminalize any counseling and psychotherapy that does not affirm transgenderism, and any parent who did not get with the Trans program would be guilty by association. Of course it uses the catchphrase “conversion therapy” to imply that this only applies to one type of therapy. It doesn’t. You can read my article here: “Leelah’s Law is Bad Law and Bad Medicine.”

The message behind the proposed law is that if you do not accept the ideology of transgenderism, you are morally responsible for any suicide of a transgender child who does not feel accepted.

I think there are at least five factors that make the onslaught of transgender propaganda different from other types of propaganda in the past.

1. It seems far more organized, focused, faster-and-more-furious than any propaganda campaign in history. (Which means it can’t withstand much scrutiny.)

2. It requires more than ever that the bystander reject physical reality in order to accommodate ever-shifting perceptions of others. This is huge. It comes with the territory that such laws require us to reject our own physical reality and question our own “gender identity.”

3. Under the phony guise of “anti-bullying” this type of propaganda exploits children and their peers as never before –physically, emotionally, and mentally.

4. The scope of the endgame is enormous: to legally and universally impose upon every human being a new definition — or rather, a non-definition — of what it means to be human.

(Even if for the moment it seems like everybody simply has the “freedom” to identify as one wishes, that’s not sustainable. Because ultimately, the ideology of transgenderism rejects biology. It’s already begun to erase everybody’s legal identity as either male or female simply by writing into law the presumption that your sex is merely “assigned at birth.”)

5. It serves to abolish the family. When male and female are eliminated as legal categories, it goes without saying that “mother” and “father” must also be eliminated as legal categories, along with any inherent right to a relationship with your biological children. That’s the logical path transgender propaganda leads us down.

C S Lewis, author of The Abolition of Man and truly a prophet of the 20th century

Corruption of the language seems to be surrounding us as never before.

On one front, we see how the transgender lobby is selling the snake oil of “gender identity.” This insists that being female and male does not exist in physical reality, but only in our minds. So at root, it’s not really an agenda about gender per se or equality. It’s an agenda to corrupt the language and every single person’s perception of reality. You will see this become more prevalent if “Leelah’s Law” — a reaction to the recent suicide of a transgender youth — is pushed. I hope to write more about it, but the idea is to ban any counseling for kids that doesn’t affirm transgenderism. Under the guise that it only bans something called “conversion therapy.”

On another related front, we can see how the push to control language is causing mayhem globally. After the massacre at the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, there is a new debate about the limits of free speech. The magazine publishes a lot of content hostile to religion – all religions – but the killings were based only on its depictions of the prophet Mohammed.

Western news organizations are falling all over themselves to censor images that raise the ire of violent terrorists, and C.S. Lewis predicted their exact behavior over 70 years ago when he published “The Abolition of Man,” his treatise on how the corruption of language leads inevitably to the corruption of mind and soul.

When we allow language to be so manipulated that it distorts reality, that puts civilization itself on the path to suicide.

Sometime in the Paleolithic past, one guy said to his friends, “Hey, have you ever noticed how small Steve the Chief’s brow is? Look at me, I’m Steve No-Brow.” Everyone laughed, then Steve the Chief caved the guy’s head in with a rock. Human affairs with regards to unauthorized satire remained the same for the next 100,000 years or so, with the only difference being who was holding the biggest rock.

So how do you balance free speech with irresponsible speech? The answer lies in something we call “Civil Society.” It subsists upon a common uncorrupted language and agreement to allow the free exchange of ideas. Unfortunately, civil society is ceding authority to the corruption of language enforced by political correctness. If civil society is ever to be rebuilt, PC must be resisted and always fought.

Unfortunately, we live in an age in which we are compelled to point out the obvious because so many have become detached from physical reality, including folks who are just plain tired and wish to bury their head in the sand hoping it will all go away. It won’t go away on its own. We need to confront assaults on reality and common sense whenever they’re imposed on us. Otherwise we end up in the Twilight Zone. Down the rabbit hole. And the world will just keep getting more surreal and less healthy for us and our children.

The MSHSL plans to vote on this policy on Thursday morning, December 4 at 9:30. The place is the MSHSL Board Room at 2100 Freeway Blvd., Brooklyn Center, MN You can get more details by clicking here. If you are concerned about it and in the area, it’s definitely worth showing up, perhaps with a sign or placard to express opposition.

The other side — flush with cash and media support — has always depended on projecting a manufactured illusion of support, always way disproportionate to any actual level of public support. Be prepared for that.

In my article, I list 12 reasons why the MSHSL is a terrible idea (for those who need to hear them):

It’s totally anti-privacy.

It drives children to consider physically unhealthy and drastic, irreversible options.

It encourages children to reject their bodies and discourages children from accepting their bodies.